Category: Contentions
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Marketing as the sector of the future
Excerpted from Average is Over by Tyler Cowen: “Despite all the talk about STEM fields, I see marketing as the seminal sector for our future economy…. “It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the…
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So, you want to start an engineering blog?
If your company really could start an engineering blog on its own, it would have one already. (A blog with three posts and one of them being “Hello World!” saddens me and does not count.) An engineer on the team would’ve made it part of their job, or the company would’ve hired an editor, or…
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Don’t think to write, write to think
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a final…
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I’m hiring technical ghostwriters!
Business has been booming, and I’m looking to work with some more people! If you’re literate with technology (e.g., you know what GitHub is!), and enjoy ghostwriting and helping other people unblock their creativity, and are curious to learn from business and technology leaders, this could be a good job for you: Ghostwriter (Technical) Part-time/freelance,…
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The myth of “with zero marketing”
Marketing constantly, and practically inevitably, suffers from attribution problems at all scales. Occasionally, someone I’m considering doing business would tell me more about their business’s momentum, and snarkily add, “Oh, and we did all of this without marketing!” The savvier ones pretend that they’re embarrassed about it. (They’re not. It’s a brag.) The main problem…
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Quality control
When I started Wonder Shuttle, I was uncontrollably obsessive with quality control. I started out as a freelance writer, so the first thing I had to do was let go of control. Still, in my mind, every article had to run through me; I was the last line of defense, the buck stopped with me,…
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The classroom parable
At Twitter, entrepreneur Kevin Lee shares an anecdote about how a family business owner, which worked in electricity, turned extra space in its warehouse into a community-based classroom for immigrant workers to learn electrical engineering. That meant every Saturday, for four hours, immigrant workers could attend this free class to learn electrical engineering skills. Hundreds…
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I was wrong about audiobooks
In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly slow, and I wouldn’t be…
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How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
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Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News. You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people—on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on…